The difficult second album

Two years have rushed by at Hubbub. Our start-up ambition was to engage a mainstream audience in environmental issues by taking a fresh and positive approach. Having reflected on what we have learned, we have set five broad ambitions for the year ahead, says Trewin Restorick, CEO and founder of environmental charity Hubbub.

Better collaboration

Our most interesting campaigns such as Neat Streets have been delivered in collaboration with diverse partner businesses. Next year we plan to take a more proactive approach in building effective collaborations to tackling stubborn environmental challenges. We have identified three campaign areas: stopping plastic litter entering rivers: encouraging more diverse and healthy diets and exploring the sharing economy in a local community.

For each of we will develop a statement of intent setting out why the challenge is important, what are the barriers to change and how we will experiment to find solutions. We will seek organisations who are willing to participate in a ‘coalition of the willing’ which will collaborate to test ideas, learn from experience and share results.

Preliminary conversations have suggested that there is a real appetite amongst companies to work in this way enabling them to reach new audiences and learn from different sectors. If you are interested in finding out more, do get in touch.

Critical friends

Inspired by the work New Citizenship has undertaken on the Future of Membership we are taking a fresh look at how we can tap into the huge amount of knowledge and energy among people who are supportive of our ambitions. We wish to create a growing number of people who can help us develop our thinking and challenge our ideas. We believe these critical friends will play a major role in shaping our work in the years ahead.

10 showcase communities

We are building an array of effective community engagement campaigns and have more in the pipeline. In the year ahead we want to work closely with 10 communities to explore whether intensive and on-going campaigns run in partnership with local authorities and community groups can create more vibrant and resilient communities.

We will seek a diverse group of communities to gain an understanding of impact across all sections of society.

Hubbub can only survive financially if we find innovative and effective solutions to major environmental challenges. Next year we need to keep the space, energy and desire required to constantly seek new solutions. This will only be achieved if we continually pass the campaigns we have developed over to others for them to replicate and take to scale. This constant ‘clearing of the decks’ will need to be central to our activities if we are to build on what has been achieved to-date and deliver a great second album.